My Best Damn Love Affair To Date

It has an open living room and dining room, and an adorable kitchen. It has a backyard. It has big bedrooms, and a second bathroom. It’s still within walking distance of work. I want it I want it I want it.

Maybe I’m too easy to please, but I don’t know… comparing the responses I had to the previous houses I looked at, I would say this is something worth getting excited about.

Every house prior to this one, I would walk through the house with my agent, and say, “I like this house!” And my agent would ask, “Would you like to put an offer on it?” To which I would reply, “Well… I want to look at a few more houses just to make sure I can’t find something better. But this is on the list.” I had that uncertainty in my gut, the one that said, well how do I know for sure this is the house for me?

But with this house… I suddenly understood what it was supposed to feel like. Ironically, I don’t believe in love at first sight in terms of human beings, but damn it all, I now cannot say that I don’t believe in love at first sight for houses. This was the first house that, when my agent asked, “Would you like to put an offer on it?”, I responded with an enthusiastic “yes!”

So imagine my frustration when the sellers didn’t seem to be in any rush to move. They still live in the house, and while they have said they are looking to downsize (the house has three bedrooms, one of which they clearly use as a guest bedroom and one which, in all its bare beauty, is still completely empty), they just haven’t found a place they like as much. When we started haggling back and forth with offers, they didn’t seem to want to budge at all. Which, you know, was not a complete deal breaker, because the price was still within my range, but it’s the principle of the matter. Come on, seller, you put your house on the market, and it’s been a while. At least be willing to play the game.

I remember sitting myself down and thinking, okay, they’re not going to budge on the price, so you’re just going to have to look for another house. It’ll be fine. Absolutely fine. You don’t need this house. There are other houses out there. I even made an appointment with my agent to view a couple of other houses, because it’s fine.

But before I even made it to that appointment, I realized what I was doing: I was giving up on the excitement I had when I first viewed the house. I was ignoring my wants because people told me to haggle. And I was going to scrap the feeling I got every time I thought about this house and go through possibly another year or more of looking just because I didn’t want to pay a price that I could, in fact, pay?

So I may have caved a little, and allowed the price to stay relatively the same. Maybe that makes me a sucker. But if all goes well, the house will be mine, so who’s the sucker now?!

Probably still me.

But here’s the thing: as usual, the things that I do in life teach me valuable lessons about myself. I learned that sometimes I have to push my pride and/or insecurity out of the picture and go for what I actually want. And yes, sometimes I’m going to have to compromise a little… in order to understand that your desires are still worth the effort that you put into them, you must first dismantle your pride.

There’s still a contingency period to go through before I know for sure that the house is going to be mine, but we at least have a contract signed. Who knows, maybe at the last minute, something will happen to prevent this transaction from actually happening; I mean, this is me and my dumb luck we’re talking about. There’s a high probability. But maybe it’ll go through. Maybe I’ll be a proud homeowner in December. I have no idea what is in store for me over the next few months, or years. But I do know a good rule of thumb: when you stumble across happiness, you’ve got to embrace it. I’m sure there will be plenty of ups and downs in my journey, and I’m sure I will have a lot of fights with my house.

Sammi Leigh Melville lives in Harrisburg, PA with her cat, Loren. She is currently preparing for the launch of her book, The Fields. She has written and directed several short films through her production company, Screaming Pictures, and is the program director for Vidjam, a non-profit organization which works to encourage and foster filmmaking in the Central PA area. You may see her on the weekends at the Harrisburg Improv Theater, performing long-form improv with one of her troops. Sammi has a strange sense of humor, a fervent love for both people and nature, and an awkward tendency to get real deep when no one was expecting it.

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